She looked down from her window on the square shoulders, thick throat, and crisp matted hair of her husband as he vanished in the darkness, and drew a breath of freedom,--a freedom not so much from him as from her own weakness that he was bearing away with him into the exonerating night.
She shut the window and sank down in her chair again, but in the encompassing and compassionate obscurity of the room.

And this was the man she had loved and for whom she had wrecked her young life! Or WAS it love?
and, if NOT, how was she better than he?
Worse; for he was more loyal to that passion that had brought them together and its responsibilities than she was.

She had suffered the perils and pangs of maternity, and yet had only the mere animal yearning for her offspring, while he had taken over the toil and duty, and even the devotion, of parentage himself.

But then she remembered also how he had fascinated her--a simple schoolgirl--by his sheer domineering strength, and how the objections of her parents to this coarse and common man had forced her into a clandestine intimacy that ended in her complete subjection to him.

She remembered the birth of an infant whose concealment from her parents and friends was compassed by his low cunning; she remembered the late atonement of marriage preferred by the man she had already begun to loathe and fear, and who she now believed was eager only for her inheritance.